Not Your Mother's Love Stories

Making peace with the ‘shift’ key

I blame that. Also my college roommate. I hold both responsible for my decade long aversion to the ‘shift’ key.

I used to type properly. Proper names, places, beginnings of sentences were all capitalized. I thought I was a fairly decent typist, with a decent typing speed. It wasn’t until I met my roommate that I realized, hey, I don’t have to use the shift key…

When I first met her, we lived on opposite sides of the dorm. Occasionally we’d be incredibly lazy and just IM each other our conversations, rather than one of us actually getting up and walking around to the other side of the building. She’d send me messages with no capital letters, and I’d send properly typed responses. Until I realized that there was no reason for me to be doing so. No one else was going to read them, so why bother?

Thus began my battles with the shift key. Term papers, resumes, cover letters, they all got the shift key treatment. Everything else? Not so much. My co-workers and supervisors got used to receiving interoffice emails with proper punctuation and spelling, just missing capital letters.

It’s not that I’ve now seen the error of my ways. It’s more that I’m all about taking the easy way out, and unfortunately, having to go through a 50,000 plus word document and waste time capitalizing words that should have been capitalized in the first place takes away from actually paying attention to what I’ve written and making sure there aren’t any giant, non sequitur-ish leaps of logic (I haven’t found any so far, but then, I’ve only gone through the first 7 chapters).

So we’ve reached a treaty, of sorts. You’ll notice I used it for this blog post. That’ll now be a regular feature here at the Rubber Duck Brigade-posts with capital letters. All writing projects will now use the shift key. In short, the shift key won the war.

Over the years I’ve worked with several writers and editors who never touched the Shift key when they were writing internal emails. I must admit, as a grammar nerd, I found it insulting. Wasn’t I worth a capital letter or two? It also affected my opinion of them as professionals. I was reluctant to assign them to write any communication that might be seen by our clients, consumers, the public, or even company higher-ups. In the professional world, not everyone is all that forgiving about unconventional writing.